Quote:
Originally Posted by shilala
You are DEFINATELY helping, my brother. You're making me think. You even still have me waffling on the raid. I know I swore it off forever, but it'd be so awesome.
I flat out forget how to do it, even. Makes me wonder if the eco drives can be put in raid. I think they spin down and shut off all the time.
I also remember that way back when, I couldn't even see if a drive had failed. I'm guessing things have come a long way since then.
Do you have a good source where I can go get read up and caught up? That might make my mind up for me if I'm more informed.
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ECO drives as in evironmentally friendly?
I don't think it would be a problem. The RAID is supported by the SATA controller on the motherboard, the drives don't know the difference. Most all of them support RAID 0 and RAID 1. Some also support RAID 5.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
RAID, an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (Changed from its original term Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks),
RAID 0 (block-level striping without parity or mirroring) has no (or zero) redundancy. It provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Hence simple stripe sets are normally referred to as RAID 0. Any disk failure destroys the array, and the likelihood of failure increases with more disks in the array... (not what you want)
RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping), data is written identically to multiple disks (a "mirrored set"). Although many implementations create sets of 2 disks, sets may contain 3 or more disks. Array provides fault tolerance from disk errors or failures and continues to operate as long as at least one drive in the mirrored set is functioning. With appropriate operating system support, there can be increased read performance, and only a minimal (i.e. almost no) write performance reduction.
It's really simple to setup. When you plug in both drives and boot up you may have to hit a function key to get into the BIOS or Array Configuration, create a new volume/array, add both disks, choose RAID 1 and save your changes. The options and wording may differ slightly, but if you only have two disks, the only options will be RAID 0 or RAID 1. So long as Windows 7 has a driver for your motherboard, you just install Windows as normal. Most of the array controllers will have some kind of notification if a drive fails. Otherwise you won't even notice, since you'll still be up and running. All you do is shutdown, replace bad drive, and boot back up. The array controller should automatically mirror the data onto the new disk. As long as it is the same architecture (SATA) and = or larger than the other disk, it will work. It doesn't have to be exactly the same.